Enclosure, Gortagowan, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Gortagowan, Co. Kerry

Some sites are lost not to time but to trees.

On the lower western slopes of Knocknagullion, on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, aerial photography from 1973 captured what appears to be an enclosure, a roughly circular or oval boundary feature of the kind commonly associated with early medieval settlement or landholding in Ireland. It was never recorded on Ordnance Survey maps, which makes the photograph its sole formal witness. Since then, a plantation of trees has grown over the area, and the site can no longer be located on the ground.

The enclosure was identified from a GSI aerial photograph, reference V281/282, taken in 1973, when the ground was described as rough boggy pasture. The surrounding landscape is typical of the lower hillslopes of Iveragh, where peat and poor grazing land have preserved, or in this case quietly swallowed, traces of earlier activity. It was catalogued by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan in their 1996 archaeological survey of the peninsula, published by Cork University Press, though even then its character was uncertain enough to be described only as a possible enclosure. The qualification matters: aerial photography can reveal cropmarks or soil patterns that suggest a buried or partially surviving feature, but without ground survey or excavation, the nature of such a site remains tentative.

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